Shikhar - Film review New
(Dir: John Mathew Matthan), Produced by Sanjoy Bhattcharjii

- Nakul

Once the shock of its maniacal velocity has passed, the visitor to Bombay might take a moment to note the city's profound ugliness. While Delhi's central location in the roomy Gangetic plains allowed it to remain a low-rise capital well into the 90s, the Arabian Sea lapping at Bombay's western coast turned it quickly into a 'skyline' metropolis, one governed by an aristocracy of builders that left the only large open spaces on the beach. It might not be irrelevant to recall another movie from too too long ago about Bombay builders: Kundan Shah's 1983 cult feature Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro . In its zany chaos, there was uncomfortable truth about a city whose soul is under siege by men who cannot let a vacant piece of land be. Its mixture of screwball comedy and pointed satire has not been rivalled since. Certainly not in John Mathew Matthan's Shikhar , where Ajay Devgan's satanic builder Gaurav Gupta – GG – dreams of a city of his own, a Las Vegas in the Western Ghats.

Shikhar is director Matthan's return to theatres after Sarfarosh (1999) briefly cast him as Bollywood's Great White Hope. Sarfarosh was a slick espionage film deriving its thrills from Pakistan's now legendary 'proxy war', creating in Aamir Khan's ACP Rathod an IPS officer as earnest and cherubic as one is ever likely to see. Mukesh Rishi's Salim redefined the patriotic Muslim and Sonali Bendre's token girlfriend unleashed the unremittingly annoying 'Don't mind' on viewers who swallowed the film's thriller credentials with its rather naïve politics.

In Shikhar , he works with a nothing plot [1]. The conflict is between Devgan's character and the residents of the ashram Rishivan, which stands in the way of his city building plans. Rishivan is a purportedly secular but terribly Sanskritic sort of place where everyone dresses in spotless white kurtas and grows exotic plants in greenhouses for use in the ashram's ayurvedic concoctions. It is adivasi land of the sort that affords plenty of space for young ashramites to enjoy chaste rolls in the hay. It also engages in other such good works as running an orphanage and school for adivasi children, all of whom have much to lose if GG wins.

So far, all is trite but well-intentioned. Matthan loses his way completely when he introduces Shahid Kapoor's character, Jaidev, son of the ashram's resident ex-textile baron Guruji, and appropriately clean-cut, squeaky clean and bland. GG's Cunning Plan to undermine the ashram's resistance involves befriending the boy and corrupting him with wine, cigars, beach-wear models and bookies, even setting Bipasha Basu on him, so he might bear on his inconveniently uncoöperative father to sell the land. Here, the film travels to the beaches of Thailand and appears worryingly comfortable in the same world it seeks to condemn. Shikhar engineers, for the benefit of Kapoor's fans presumably, a fiery climax where circumstances contrive to force him out of his shirt. There are disco songs, ramp songs, a bhajan, unimaginative stuff. Devgan is surprisingly smooth, hitting all the right notes, slipping amorally from suit to modish suit. Shahid Kapoor, however, does much to fuel the growing speculation [2] that he was bred in a gene lab to the specifications of current market research. His colourless public image impels one to misty-eyed recollections of the drug- and crime-smeared Sanjay Dutt-led brat-brigade of the 80s. He could serve as mascot of India Inc.

This sort of dismissal, however, is rather too easy to make. It feels cruel to carp at a film only as flawed as much of Bollywood's hackneyed produce. However, Shikhar demands to be treated differently. The script rarely allows the item numbers to get in the way of a good sermon: the dangers of smoking, ethics in business and the pleasures of nature, among other things. For all its attempts to wear its 'message' lightly – Matthan says in an interview [3] for instance, 'It is a social film. It is also about ecology and the environment, but I don't say usually this [sic] because it turns people off. They think it is documentary [sic]' – it takes on issues of considerable gravitas and with the same gravitas must it be judged.

To start with, its promos on television reveal a marketing strategy that seems to render directorial intentions irrelevant. Hence the attractions of on-screen wine, cigars, beach-wear models and item numbers are to be the reason for watching a film that is decidedly anti all of the above [4]. The irony of having to head for the multiplex in the shiny new mall to catch Bollywood's critique of the consumerist lifestyle is rather hard to stomach.

Matthan will receive no fan mail from the feminists. While the refreshingly acne-stricken Amrita Rao gets to be virginal princess of Shahid Kapoor's heart, it is Bipasha Basu's Natasha as GG's model girlfriend who hogs the screen time. Her character's name propels her into the ranks of heroines afflicted (infected?) by what Shabana Azmi dubbed the Miss Nita Syndrome, of the woman without a surname. On the one hand, she serves as symbol of all the perversion of her world. On the other, she is the voice of pragmatism, of 'feminine good sense', dispenser of unpretentious homilies on such things as why Bengalis eat fish. She ends up cast, however, in an upsettingly reactionary mould: for all her bad girl veneer, it's the family and kids she really wants.

Guruji is an even more problematic character. As played by Pakistani actor Javed Sheikh, he recalls the many Gandhian industrialists of 40s, presumably the source of the fortune it took to keep Gandhiji in poverty. He is the benevolent technocrat who will acquire his money by honest means and give much of it away in charity. One is to applaud his philanthropy, think warmly of Narayan Murthy's similarly munificent paid toilets and join India 's neo-liberal media in placing the job for India 's salvation at their bountiful feet. Or might one rather sit the sanctimonious Guruji down and have him watch the scene in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane where the self-satisfied capitalist is given a healthy dose of union-speak:

You talk about the people of the United States as though they belonged to you ... You talk about giving them their rights as though you could make a present of liberty. Remember the working man? You used to defend him quite a good deal. Well, he's turning into something called organized labor and you don't like that at all. And listen, when your precious underprivileged really get together - that's going to add up to something bigger than - than your privilege and then I don't know what you'll do - sail away to a desert island, probably, and lord it over the monkeys.

The film is not much interested in the adivasis themselves expect as grateful recipient's of the rich man's hand-outs. They exist as part of the landscape in which the grand drama of the beleaguered capitalist and his son might play out. One hardly wants to proclaim oneself arch-defender of tribal rights (and heaven knows there are enough tribal stories floating about the festival circuit), but would it be too much, one wonders, to ask for a less exploitative portrayal. Or would that make it too much like documentary?

Notes

[1] From the Internet Movie Database ( http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0475627/plotsummary )
[2] If there has been none, let it start now.
[3] From Rediff.com ( http://in.rediff.com/movies/2005/dec/29mattan.htm )
[4] From Bollyvista.com ( http://www.bollyvista.com/article/a/32/5940 )
Curiously, Amrita Rao seems to have picked up on this irony. The media, however, manages to mangle her rather pertinent observation into a star tantrum about not being in the promos.